Focus association with 'only' in Russian

Abstract

This paper explores the behavior of 'only' in Russian. I show that 'only' must be immediately adjacent to the focused item in Russian, arguing that this requirement is due to syntactic focus movement, triggered by a strong [Foc] feature of 'only'. The displacement of an F-marked constituent results in right-adjunction to only, yielding an appropriately local feature checking configuration. Furthermore, I demonstrate that 'only' itself is limited to a handful of positions within the structure. Specifically, it must meet two requirements in order to merge successfully. I suggest that 'only' is an adjunct strictly to functional projections, which are also phases. Ultimately, my goal is to show that only can adjoin to vP, CP and FP (a functional projection in the nominal domain).